Premature born baby Isaac Newton was so weak and small that a few people thought it could survive. The baby was too weak to cry or suckle. The prediction was that if the baby survived it would carry some handicap or malignancy. However the mother Henna nursed the baby for three years helping it live and then married a man who would not accept Isaac. Newton was fostered by his maternal grandma. His premature birth deficiencies were aggravated by events that caused him anguish in the childhood. They all combined to cause him some kind of mental abnormality that may have troubled him throughout his life often in the imperceptible form and sometimes flashing up in his behaviour. It may also have given his brain that freakish extraordinary inventive talent. In our context we may take the case of our famous bowler Chanrashekhar whose Polio affected wrist gave him ability to spin a ball with such twist that no normal wrist could. And Chandreshekhar became our cricket legend.
The child Newton did not get parental love that every child gets normally. That may have made Newton’s mind get inferiority complex due to hormonal activity. Ironically his third law of motion ‘Action and reaction are equal and opposite’ may have worked in his own brain as well. The inferiority complex and premature birth caused deficiency suffering brain may have reacted by creating extra power of learning, perception and genius in the brain centre related to education in compensation.
The psychologists believe that the people affected by emotions of excitement, depression and inferiority often do extraordinary works to prove themselves. Ordinary person can not do that in absence of a psychological push. If such disadvantaged person has talent and capability he may turn his misfortune into fortune. His brain may turn the disadvantage into victory or advantage. It gets inspired to make greater effort as it is like a wounded lion becoming more dangerous and gambler putting everything on in one big final stake.
Purely in medical terms whatever abnormality Newton’s brain suffered from was apparently caused by his experiments with mercury for research. He had handled mercury a lot. The doctors reached the conclusion his mental disorder was the ill effect of that. Newton betrayed confirming symptoms of that. The close associates of Newton admitted that he used to work experiments with mercury a lot. Mercury poisoning apparently affected his health and he showed signs of abnormal irritability and short temper.
Isaac Newton lived with insomnia and irritability all through his life. Today medical science has made great progress and it had subjected samples of past great men recovered from their graves to forensic test and found arsenic in Napoleon’s body and mercury in Newton. In case of Newton a lock of his hair was preserved when he was buried. The hair revealed the mercury fact. The lock of hair is still kept as a display item at Cambridge University. Too much meddling with mercury may have pushed him towards his death. But anyway whatever life he lived, lived purposefully, productively, inventively, famously, honourably and meaningfully.
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